Understand Media was founded by Nick Pernisco with the sole intention of educating the community about media. Mr. Pernisco is an Associate Professor at Santa Monica College, and has also lectured at California State University, Northridge. He has been involved in the media education community since 2005, but has been producing media professionally since 1996.
Since media is something we should all know about, Understand Media contains resources for teachers of all levels, parents, children, and the general community. Resources include lesson plans for teaching media literacy in the classroom, helpful books about media, media literacy and media issues, and links to numerous websites that help deepen the understanding of media in our society.
Articles about media are also provided for download and use in the classroom and in general discussions. The site also features multimedia presentations of key issues, available in both audio-only and in video formats.
We also pride ourselves in being one of the only media education sites in the United States to provide resources in Spanish.
Content Accessibility Policy
Understand Media's first priority is to spread the values and concepts of media literacy throughout the world, to the most amount of people possible, through the use of original content available on the site. Because of this, the content on Understand Media is provided free of charge.
The materials may also be reproduced for use in classrooms, but may not be posted on other websites. If you find an article or resource useful, please link to the page on Understand Media on which the content is available.
For more information about this and other legal policies, please visit our terms of use.
Site Advertising
Understand Media is proud to present our content with no third-party advertising. This means that we do not accept money or barter exchanges for any ad, banner, or content on our site. We are committed to bringing you only the best material we possibly can, and this can only be done free of bias by not accepting money or gifts from any person or organization. This way, you can be assured that any content you see on the site is content we personally believe will be of use to you.
We do however, work with our sister company, Carmelina Films, to bring you information about their media literacy documentaries. We also work with Amazon.com to provide purchase links to products we appreciate and recommend. These links help provide revenue for the site, but we are very selective about the books and other products we link to. Amazon pays our site a small percentage of the purchase price if you buy these products through our link.
